The Incomplete Amorist

She had turned up the electric lights now, at her toilet table, and was pulling the pins out of her ruffled hair.

"And he'd never care about her children. And they'd be ugly little horrors."

She was twisting her hair up quickly and firmly.

"I have a right to live my own life," she said, just as Betty had said six months before. "Why am I to sacrifice everything to her--especially when I don't suppose she cares--and now that I know I could get him if she were out of the way?"

She looked at herself in the silver-framed mirror and laughed.

"And you always thought yourself a proud woman!"

Suddenly she dropped the brush; it rattled and spun on the polished floor.

She stamped her foot.

"That settles it!" she said. For in that instant she perceived quite clearly and without mistake that Vernon's attitude had been a parti-pris: that he had thrown, himself on her pity of set purpose, with an end to gain.

"Laughing at me all the time too, of course! And I thought I understood him. Well, I don't misunderstand him for long, anyway," she said, and picked up the hair brush.

"You silly fool," she said to the woman in the glass.

And now she was fully dressed--in long light coat and a hat with, as usual, violets in it. She paused a moment before her writing-table, turned up its light, turned it down again.

"No," she said, "one doesn't write anonymous letters. Besides it would be too late. He'll see her to-morrow early--early."

The door of the flat banged behind her as it had banged behind Vernon half an hour before. Like him, she called a carriage, and on her lips too, as the chill April air caressed them, was the sense of kisses.

And she, too, gave to the coachman the address: Fifty-seven Boulevard Montparnasse.